Has Hell Frozen Over? An Agile Maturity Model?

Ross Pettit, a Client Principal with ThoughtWorks, describes the potential need for an agile maturity model (AMM) and provides some ideas about what the AMM should address. His AMM is not intended to be prescriptive or authoritarian. It is an attempt to create a simple, flexible, fact-based assessment of the degree of agility in fundamental IT practices and, subsequently, in an organization. With this framework, an organization can quickly assess how its current processes enable and inhibit responsiveness and can determine what it should be doing. Fully applied, an AMM also helps identify what teams must change to be able to achieve responsiveness and then structure a business case for making those changes.

I believe that a complete AMM should address in some form the the following concepts as well.

The evolution of requirements. i.e., Where is an organization in defining the right things at the right time. It is not just a question Fat upfront to lightweight on the fly. It is about the "right" level of Requiremetns definition as a request moves through the SDLC.

Evolutionary Stages: Addressing composite measures. As typical in large organization there can be teams at various evolutionary stages. Another issue that needs to be reviewed is the dependancy heirarchy of the chain of applications in the enterprise. Down stream "service" and "support" applications tend to automagically move towards more agile approaches as the requirements for this systems are often provided by upstream technology groups and not business clients per se.

Meauring Progress: A completed AMM should "suggest" Metrics that support clear demonstration of the cost/benefit of moving in either direction along the continum of evolutionary steps. The challange of "restructuring" would become diminished and in fact reveresed as value-add is demonstrated. It would become a natural evolution.